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JOHN PROCCACINO, MIKE CRANE AND (IN THE PHOTO NEAR THE END OF THE ARTICLE) LISA BIRNBAUM IN THE LONG WHARF THEATRE PRODUCTION OF ITALIAN-AMERICAN RECONCILIATION. PHOTOS BY T. CHARLES ERICKSON. If you don’t know Italian-American Reconciliation,  you really should. It’s one of the earliest and funniest plays from John Patrick Shanley, who’d been leading up … Continue reading »

The musical Memphis is set in Tennessee, obviously, but it gets around. Last year’s Best Musical Tony winner already has a Connecticut connection—co-producer Sue Frost, who used to work at Goodspeed Musicals, and director Christopher Ashley, a 1968 Yale grad. This weekend the show will fan out far beyond Broadway through that newfangled medium of … Continue reading »

The novelist Harper Lee has apparently broken a 50 year silence and consented to be interviewed for a new biography of her by Marja Mills. Major international literary news sensation. So how’d you like to be the Boston Children’s Theatre company, sitting pretty with a new adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird slated for performances … Continue reading »

The Yale Dance Theater Pilot Program has nothing to do with flying planes, but it will exhibit some tricky lift-offs Saturday afternoon in Yale’s Stiles-Morse Crescent Theater (19 Tower Parkway, New Haven). The event is not a full-fledged dance concert but an intriguing “lecture/demonstration” regarding the seven-member undergrad troupe’s attempt to reconstruct Twyla Tharp’s legendary … Continue reading »

Elm Shakespeare has measured its resources and knows what it will perform for its 16th season (which, since they occasionally did more than one, has yielded over 20 shows). It’s the tricky, creepy yet enchanting Measure for Measure, to be performed August 18 through Sept. 4 in the company’s accustomed environs of Edgerton Park. Details … Continue reading »

KATHLEEN MCNENNY AS CHARLOTTE AND STEPHEN WALLEM AS BOB IN CHRISTOPHER DURANG’S BEYOND THERAPY, AT WESTPORT COUNTRY PLAYHOUSE THROUGH MAY 14. PHOTO BY T. CHARLES ERICKSON   “I really love this play,” Westport Country Playhouse associate artistic director David Kennedy shares. The play is Beyond Therapy, and our analysis begins promisingly. “I’ve always liked Durang’s … Continue reading »

“Look, I told you already. There’s no room.” “But you used to do a full-page preview of every tour we’ve brought through here since—gosh, at least two editors ago.” “I know, like 80 years. But we just don’t have the space anymore. We gave away a coupon booklet with the paper yesterday, and the booklet … Continue reading »

Michael McQuilken and Chad Raines, who played bandmates in McQuilken’s rock musical Jib, hope to form a band in real life. Both are graduating for the Yale School of Drama next month. Both are looking to do theater things in New York, but Raines—who was a New Haven resident for years before hitching his star … Continue reading »

John Moauro has been in the tribe of the Broadway revival of Hair since it was just a hippie- jacket fringe affair. The long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided, powered, flowered and confettied, bangled, tangled, spangled and spaghettied “tribal love-rock … Continue reading »

A 95-year-old Baron Bean strip found on a website devoted to the works of Krazy Kat kreator George Herriman. (A complete run of Baron Bean, 1916-17, was published by Hyperion Press in 1976.)